Follow by Email

Sunday, 21 December 2014

When
they rebuilt the main synagogue in Cologne after the War, there was much discussion
about which Biblical text to use for the inscription on the outside of the
building. In the end they decided to use the words from Zechariah that we read in
our synagogues on the Shabbat in the middle of Hanukkah: ‘Not by might, nor by
power, but by My spirit, says the Lord of Hosts’ (4:6).

It’s
one of Judaism’s great prophetic sentiments – filled with the wishfulness, the
hopefulness, that we could live in a world where force, aggression, warfare,
violence do not penetrate into every crevice of our lives, are not the ill-fated
routes through which change takes place, are not the deep background throb
resonating through society, generation after generation. One can see how, after
the destruction wrought both by force of arms and murderous brutality in the
Second World War, that quotation might have appealed to those looking for a
message to take into the future.

The
quotation though does contain an irony. The prophet voices this semi-pacifist wish
about how change might happen- ‘Not by
might, nor by power, but by My spirit’ -in the name of Adonai Tzeva’ot,
the ‘Lord of Hosts’. But Tzeva’ot
refers to battalions, battle line-ups: Adonai
Tzeva’ot is the God of war, the God that inspires people to fight, to take
up arms, the God that fighters often believe is on their side, because their
side is right and godly and the enemy are godless evil-doers who refuse to see
the light.

So
we are given a prophetic text that has a tension built into it. A God is
associated with the fantasy that aggression is the way to solve problems is
made to say, ‘No, no, it’s not through might, military aggression, or through
mis-use of power, force, that you are to proceed, ki im b’ruchi, but through My spirit, through the breathe of life
with which I animate you and all of being’. It is as if the prophet suddenly intuits
that the God who has in the past sponsored aggression on His behalf is now
dis-arming himself - is saying, as it were, ‘No, I’ve got this wrong: I need to
draw on, and you need to draw on, something else within Me, within you, something
on the side of life, something creative, the divine ruach that was there from the beginning of time, the spirit of life
that the Genesis story talks about as being present as Creation itself takes
place, ‘hovering’ over the waters as darkness is dispelled and light is brought
into being.’ (Genesis 1:2)

This
pivotal prophetic verse is planted in the middle of a dialogue between the
prophet and the divine messenger, the malach,
who prompts him throughout the Book of Zechariah into new understandings. On
this occasion we have the imagery of the menorah, the gold candelabrum in the
Temple, and its lamps, and – like ‘someone wakened from sleep’, the text says (4:1)
– the prophet has his eyes opened, and he’s moved to wonder: ‘what is this
symbol really about?’

And
in a moment of enlightenment, of illumination, he sees the menorah and its
lights in a new light, a new realisation: ‘If God breathes ruach through all of life, all of humanity, including oneself, it
can make no sense to attack or kill other human beings in the name of that God,
for those others contain the spirit of God within them, just as you do.’ This
is a breakthrough moment, a new religious consciousness, coming through the
prophet, in the form of a dream or a vision or whatever it is that happens
within the psyche of Zechariah. A moment of understanding about the divine that,
more than 2000 years on, many so-called religious people just can’t grasp, or
live in the light of.

Here
we are, in the middle of our Festival of Light; and here we are, in the middle
of a world that can seem to get darker and darker, month by month, sometimes
week by week: just this week we had the Sydney cafe attacks, and the Taliban’s callous
slaughter of schoolchildren and their teachers; and over recent months we’ve
had those tit-for-tat murders by Arabs and Jews in Israel and the West Bank;
and then there’s been the barbarism of ISIS, not only the gory videoed
beheadings, but the ongoing (largely unreported) murders of Kurds in Iraq, as
well as Sunni civilians, and Sunni tribesmen – and these are their own Sunni co-religionists
who are being killed, for not being God-fearing enough. Or devout in the
so-called ‘right’ way.And we light our candles
and quote ‘Not by might, nor by power’ – knowing that we still live in world
saturated in aggression, in which might and power, in the name of religion, in
the name of a God who is thought of as going into battle for our point of view,
is a frightening and toxic element in so many places.

And lest you think I’m concentrating mainly on
Islamic aggression - and I've passed over the latest atrocities from Boko Haram, of mass murder and kidnapping - we also saw this week – from the country which has ‘In God
We Trust’ inscribed on its banknotes – the publication by the US Senate of the
report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation programme after 9/11, which
details the systematic torture of suspected terrorist detainees, in at least one
instance to the point of death.

This was a programme run not only by the
perversely labelled ‘intelligence community’ but one that relied heavily (as
Physicians for Human Rights put it) ‘on the participation and active engagement
of various health professionals’ – doctors, psychologists – ‘to commit, conceal
and attempt to justify these crimes.’ Men and women for whom that patriotic
song ‘God Bless America’ presumably provides a suitably comforting background cover story
to justify the unjustifiable. (That song, by the way, is one of the more
ambiguous Jewish gifts to America – it was originally written by Israel Beilin
in 1918, with the lyrics revised in 1938. You might know him better by the name
he took on, Irving Berlin.)

Why
are we lighting our candles? What are we doing? What are we saying? Each night an
additional flame is lit, and in our homes this archetypal celebration of the
triumph of light over the forces of darkness is being enacted. We know that the
symbolism is universal. Every culture has its rituals of renewal and
regeneration, often embracing the motifs of fire and light. There is, it seems,
a deep human need to witness to the renewal of hope – in spite of the darkness
around us, literal and metaphysical and moral. And maybe to spite the darkness.
Diwali has passed, and Christmas is upon us, and we sense this universal need,
around the winter solstice, to celebrate light and renewal. We are drawn into,
seduced into, this symbolic realm: we deeply want reasons to feel hopeful when
there is darkness around us.

Hanukkah
does offer us this hopefulness – but you have to work hard to get at it. After
all, this eight-day holiday originates in a historic memory of an ancient military
victory in a guerrilla campaign fought against foreign (Graeco-Syrian)
occupiers. Against all the odds, a group of zealous anti-assimilationist Jewish
religious nationalists took back the Temple in Jerusalem and re-dedicated it to
their God - Hanukkah means ‘Dedication’. We don’t like to think of Judah the
Maccabee and his followers as religious terrorists, because terrorists are
always ‘others’, not ‘us’. But we have to struggle with this uncomfortable
historical knowledge, just as the rabbis in the Talmud in later generations
struggled with it: that it was through armed raids on the occupying enemy that
the Temple was re-captured.

The
rabbis knew that Hanukkah began as a sort of old soldiers’ holiday – like an
IRA re-union – but they gradually shifted the emphasis away from the role armed
rebellion had played and highlighted certain spiritual values and ideals. ‘Not
by might, nor by power, but by My Spirit’ was their choice of text to be read
in synagogues at this time of the year. And they promoted too the legend that
we all now associate with Hanukkah, that when the Temple’s candelabrum (the Menorah) came to be
re-dedicated, there was but a single flask of undefiled oil to be found, enough
for one day only. And yet – a miracle! – it lasted for eight days, till fresh
supplies arrived.

So
the Talmudic rabbis used this ‘wonder tale’ (German has an excellent term for
these kind of stories: wundermärchen)
to justify the continued celebration of the ‘festival of lights’. It’s a typical
example of rabbinic creativity – they suppressed Hanukkah’s militaristic
origins in favour of its symbolic and metaphoric resonances: they stressed the
faith required to persevere against the odds and to resist a dominant culture which
had different values and priorities; they promoted the belief that sparks of divine
light in us can outshine the darkness grafted to our souls; they dared us to
have the audacity to hope that human goodness is more powerful than human destructiveness.

And
of course there are times when that symbolic flask of oil, representing the
human spirit, does spark into life - and we see the divine qualities of care
and compassion shining out. We saw it is Sydney during the week when one woman
tweeted a message to her Muslim neighbour while the siege was going on, ‘I’ll
ride with you’, because of a concern that there might be an anti-Muslim
backlash. And that tweet was re-tweeted – and within 4 hours 150,000
Australians had offered this under the hashtag ‘illridewithyou’.

People
want to believe in something hopeful in dark times. We need this in order to
keep us going. Witness the prevalence of the story about the unofficial Christmas
truce in the trenches in 1914, the sharing of carols, the fraternising with the
enemy, that legendary game of football (which probably never took place) - but as
the director John Ford has one of his characters say in ‘The Man Who Shot
Liberty Valance’ : "When the legend becomes
fact, print the legend”.

Judaism is pretty good at that. We've been doing it for
millennia. So let’s use the rest of Hanukkah – whatever its historical and
legendary background – to enjoy its symbolism, and be inspired by its symbolism:
let’s keep the divine sparks within us alight, living out the values that we
know are God’s true values: compassion, care, love, generosity, righteousness.
‘Not by might, nor by force, but by My Spirit’. This remains our hope when all
around seems dark.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, December 20th,
2014]

Saturday, 6 December 2014

Fifty years ago this weekend you
could have heard a great sermon. You would’ve had to have gone to St Paul’s
Cathedral to hear it, 6th December 1964, and you would’ve been one
of 3,000 people gathered there. You would have heard the preacher build up
slowly, softly, a low drawl to his voice, but with gathering momentum; and, as The Times reported, you’d have heard the
tempo increase and the words coming ‘tumbling out in a flood of oratory.
Biblical quotations rolling off’ the speaker’s tongue, who ‘was actor, poet and
preacher all at the same time’.(Those
were the days).

Martin Luther King took his
text from the Book of Revelation, in the New Testament, and although it is not
one of his most famous speeches it contains all his distinctive themes about
justice and oppression and the quest for freedom, that renowned fusion in him
of religious vision and political passion, or maybe we can say religious
passion and political vision, because for him political and social action was
the arena in which religious ideals were to be enacted – he had a profoundly
Judaic understanding of how the two are intertwined, necessarily.

There is of course a private
domain for religious feeling, and spiritual experience and yearning – but the
ways in which the personal dimension of religiosity is then enacted in the
outer realm of action has always been foundational for Judaism as a religious
culture. As this week’s Torah text reminds us, Jacob doesn’t just mourn the
loss of his beloved Rachel, he sets up a pillar on her grave: a public memorial although it is a personal,
private loss (Genesis 35: 20).

And in this week in which the
State of Israel has teetered on the brink of a truly alarming decision to
change its basic laws to declare that its national rights would be extended
only to Jews, it is worth re-calling King’s message, repeated by him countless
times in various forms; that, as he put it, ‘God is not interested in the
freedom of white, black or yellow men, but in the freedom of the whole human
race.’ And perhaps even more pertinent now to Israel’s historical situation were
his words that ‘We must not seek to rise from a position of disadvantage to one
of advantage, substituting injustice of one type for that of another.’ Although
he wasn’t talking at all about Israel as a state, that’s a prescient
encapsulation of the whole drama of Israel’s short existence as a nation state,
born out of disadvantage but slowly, gradually, and now to many eyes,
‘substituting injustice of one type for that of another’.

The new laws which have been
proposed – on hold now, maybe, because of the rebellion in the cabinet which
has led Netanyahu to sack his dissenters and call an early election in March –
are in direct contradiction to the democratic principles enshrined in Israel’s
Declaration of Independence, that the state was to be ‘based on the principles
of liberty, justice and freedom expressed by the prophets of Israel’ to ‘affirm
complete social and political equality for all its citizens, regardless of
religion, race or gender.’ The great
irony of the proposed legislation is that it is being done in the name of
Israel’s Jewish identity, but to deny national rights to the 20% of Israeli
citizens who are not Jewish is in direct opposition to the Torah laws which
state that you are to have ‘the same rules for yourself and the foreigner residing
amongst you’ (Numbers 15: 15-16, 29). To promote the so-called Jewish character
of the state in a way that is against both the letter and the spirit of Torah
is breathtakingly hypocritical , to say nothing of morally crass.

We should be under no
illusion that what will start by the downgrading of Arabic from its current
status as an official language of Israel will not be the end of it. Although it
is a historical analogy I am loathe to bring to bear here – because it can be
misused by those who harbour a hatred of Israel - we do remember how the
anti-Jewish legislation in Germany was instituted in stages during the 1930s: first
of all came the barring of Jews from the civil service and various professions
(1933); followed by quotas on Jewish students at universities and in the
medical and legal professions; next came the Nuremberg laws prohibiting
relationships between Jews and Aryans, and the holding by Jews of any public
office (September 1935); in 1937 and 1938 Jews were forbidden to enter into Aryan areas –
Rachel’s Tomb by the way is already in an Arab-free zone, it has a huge 12 foot
concrete and barbed wire wall around the road leading to it in Bethlehem, and
there is military security you have to pass throughto get anywhere near it (but I digress) - Jewish
doctors couldn’t treat non-Jews, eventually Jews couldn’t own radios, go to
public swimming pools... well, I don’t need to rehearse the way a country slips
into racist and semi-fascistic legislation to manage ‘alien’ presences in its
midst.

One example of the pernicious
atmosphere that is now present there is the recent arson attack, last weekend,
on the Yad B’Yad bilingual school in
Jerusalem, the only school in the city where Jews and Arabs learn together. On
the wall, lest we are in any doubt about the mindset behind this, was
spray-painted the slogans ‘Death to Arabs’ and ‘There is no co-existence with
cancer’.

So those of us who have
always believed that Israel was both a historical and moral necessity get more
and more frightened, more and more disturbed, more and more angry, when we see
the erosion of core democratic principles being enacted or mooted within
Israel. Ethnic transfer is now openly suggested by some parliamentarians – and
who knows who will hold the balance of power come March? and what would we do then, we Jews in the
diaspora? Are there no red lines for us?

Does there not come a point
when we Jews in the diaspora who still have a wish for, a faith in, the Torah’s
vision for Israel being a ‘light to the nations’, a model for how to live in
the world, where justice and compassion and righteousness are the guiding
principles of society, does there not come a point when the nation state that carries
this numinous name ‘Israel’ so degrades its Jewish values that we say ‘Enough’?
Enough injustice, enough apologetics, enough name-calling any criticism as
anti-semitism (or Jewish self-hatred), enough legalist attempts to justify the
morally unjustifiable.

When do we say that only if
the Jewish national project is a project congruent with the messianic spirit of
those prophets of Israel mentioned in the Declaration of Independence will it
be a project worthy of our unyielding love and our unbreakable support? Are we
allowed to think that? To say that?

When I read the texts of our
tradition, a sedrah like the one we read today (Genesis 32:4 – Genesis 36),
which reminds us that the patriarch Jacob metamorphosed through his life from
being a trickster, a ‘heel’ (the root meaning of Ya’akov), to this ambiguous, numinous name of Yisrael, ‘the one who wrestles with the divine’, ‘the one who
struggles to bring the divine into the world’; and when I read how he fought
with his brother Esau but eventually becomes reconciled with his brother after
a lifetime of deception; when I read how to gain the name ‘Israel’ he wrestles
with something, internal and external (the text can be read in different ways),
a wrestling that leaves him with an injury, a limp - he staggers away from this
encounter with a wound that he carries for the rest of his life – when I read
this narrative, I recognise its power as a story that applies to each one of us
as we journey through life.

Do we not recognise
ourselves, battling with our demons, wrestling to enact our visions, our
deepest beliefs, carrying the scars, the pain,of life’s journey? For we can’t avoid the pain: Jacob is bereaved here
in our text - and he still has all the tragedy to come of his loss of his favourite son
Joseph, torn to pieces by a wild animal, or so he thinks when his sons bring
back to him the bloody coat of many colours; though the wild animals are his
sons, or some of them. In this sedrah, chapter 34, Simeon and Levi massacre the
men-folk of Shechem after the rape of their sister - who would be a parent of
this bunch, born of four different mothers, the mothers fraught with rivalry,
and the sons too?

And we think dysfunctional
families might be a modern phenomenon; but they are our ‘First Family’, our
mythic ancestors. What a mess they were,
what a mess they made of their lives, the Torah doesn’t hide it from us – yet
through it all something is working itself out, some vision of formulating a
way of being as a people, ‘a nation and a company of nations’ (35:11), who will
inherit aland – and this is where the
individual story becomes collective – a land on which they are to try to live ethically,
try to live having learnt from mistakes, trying to live in ways that reflect
the divine spirit which animates the whole story, that spirit of El Shaddai,
God Almighty, who speaks to Jacob here (35:11) but evolves too as the
characters evolve, evolves into Adonai,
Adonai, El Rachum v’chanum, erech apayim v’rav hesed(Exodus 34:6) – ‘the Eternal, the Spirit that animates all of being with the
potential for compassion and grace and the capacity to bear suffering without
retaliation and filled with love and kindness’. I think of all this when I read
these texts, they are the underpinnings of Jewish identity, complex and
ambiguous, but truthful to life in their complexity and ambiguities.

This is the vision that we in
the Diaspora, we Jews who inhabit the faith of Judaism without committing
ourselves to live in the land of Israel, or the State of Israel, this is the
vision we try to stay true to, to uphold, try to live out in our own lives; and
it’s the vision that we have to unashamedly insist that those who speak in the
name of Jewishness in the so-called Jewish national home also uphold, and
commit themselves to. Their failure to do so, and the continuation of the path
they have set themselves on, does not bear thinking about. Though thinking
about it we have to: thinking and speaking about it - the unbearable being what
the prophets of Israel did find themselves speaking about, and warning about,
much good did it do them; though they didn’t do it for their own good, but for
the sake of the integrity of their people, and their faithfulness to the Holy
One of Israel and that divine vision of how people are meant to treat each
other in the down-to-earth realities of everyday life.

‘Substituting injustice of
one type for that of another’ cannot be the way forward. Let’s hope, and pray,
and find ways of ensuring, that our darkest fears, born out of our historical diasporic
memories, do not come to pass in this Promised Land that threatens to become
another Egypt. [based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, December 6th, 2014]